A Cover a Day

Ok, how about this for an idea. We take it in turns to post a favourite (British spelling) comic cover every day. This went really well on the comic fan website that I used to frequent. What we tried to do was find a theme or subject and follow that, until we all got bored with that theme. I'd like to propose a theme of letters of the alphabet. So, for the remainder of October (only 5 days) and all of November, we post comic cover pictures associated with the letter "A". Then in December, we post covers pertaining to the letter "B". The association to the letter can be as tenuous as you want it to be. For example I could post a cover from "Adventure Comics" or "Amazing Spider Man". However Spider Man covers can also be posted when we're on the letter "S". Adventure Comic covers could also be posted when we're on the letter "L" if they depict the Legion of Super Heroes. So, no real hard, fast rules - in fact the cleverer the interpretation of the letter, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

And it's not written in stone that we have to post a cover every day. There may be some days when no cover gets posted. There's nothing wrong with this, it just demonstrates that we all have lives to lead.

If everyone's in agreement I'd like to kick this off with one of my favourite Action Comic covers, from January 1967. Curt Swan really excelled himself here.

Frankly, no. When I tracked 1st Issue Special #10, I was shocked on how awful it was. Not "So-Bad-It's-Good" Bad but truly terribly bad! It made The Green Team and the Dingbats look like the New Teen Titans! What were they thinking???

Frankly, no. When I tracked 1st Issue Special #10, I was shocked on how awful it was. Not "So-Bad-It's-Good" Bad but truly terribly bad! It made The Green Team and the Dingbats look like the New Teen Titans! What were they thinking???

Comics were read by little kids through teens. "The Outsiders" could conceivably have appealed to a little kid's interest in grottiness. My recollection is I thought it scary when I first saw it and flicked through it.

It was one of a series of comics Joe Simon produced for DC with Jerry Grandenetti. The others were Champion Sports, Prez and "The Green Team".

One of my favorite ASM covers, probably because it's fairly unique, but Romita, Sr., did a standout job on all four in this set. I recently read Slugfest, an account of the 50 years (and counting) contest between DC & Marvel, and it's mentioned how circa 1965 the DC bigwigs were trying to figure out why Marvel was doing so well -- their output wasn't yet outselling DC but while DC's rate of issues published vs. the number reported as unsold by vendors for most of their mags had gone down to barely above 50% actually sold, many of Marvel's had gone up to 70% sold (of course, Marvel was still contractually limited in how many different mags it could publish each month and so DC had far more titles to sell each month). At any rate, one of the things DC editors latched onto about Marvel was the number of word balloons on the covers so they decided they would put a lot more word balloons and verbage on their covers. Apparently, when Stan Lee found out about that he decided to go in the opposite direction and as such for several years, most Marvel covers had no word balloons and relatively little other copy other than the name of the mag and title of the story (or variant title) as with these four, with only the cover to issue 56 more than a handful of words, but still no word balloons.